Six weeks after I came to America, I began to hanker for plain white rice, cooked the way my mother used to back in Bangladesh. I was tired of fried rice, of Mexican beans and rice, of the sticky Japanese stuff, of wild rice from Louisiana, even the ...

I first eyed the massive white Victorian hotel that lay by the ocean front like a cold slab of mausoleum wall one sunny afternoon. I was on my way to make a trek up a great big hill known as the Bray Head in the small seaside town of Bray, roughly ...

I avoided talking to people, mostly because I couldn’t say much more than hello. I wanted to talk, but the fear of not being understood, or mixing up four years of French with two weeks of Italian, stopped me.
I sat down on ...